Seminars on Science Water Course Independent Evaluation

In 2010, Inverness Research evaluated Water, a course offered by Seminars on Science, the Museum's online teacher education and professional development program. The report includes sample findings from a survey of 22 learners from nine states, who describe their experience the Water course. Two teachers are profiled.

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Seventeen-year-old Joshua had fond memories of swimming in Arkansas’s Strawberry River, a popular site for community gatherings and picnics. But after the construction of a wastewater treatment facility upstream, no one would enter the waters. “The wonderland where I spent so many hours as a child is deserted now, and nobody swims or fishes in that section of the river,” Joshua would later write. “I decided to find out for myself if the [facility] had indeed contaminated the water, or if the community had overreacted.”

Growing up in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, 14-year-old George was always attentive to its aquatic life. When he learned the waters were acidifying, George wondered how it would affect aquatic organisms.

Since 1990, scientists from the American Museum of Natural History have traveled to Mongolia’s vast Gobi Desert each summer in search of fossils, continuing a tradition of Museum expeditions to the region that began in the 1920s. In 1993, Museum researchers working with Mongolian scientists uncovered one of the richest fossil beds ever found: Ukhaa Tolgod. The site produced hundreds of dinosaur, lizard, and mammal fossils from the Cretaceous period.

Like the 18th-century German naturalist August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof, whose beautifully illustrated Historia naturalis ranarum nostratium (Natural history of the native frogs) he describes in an essay in Natural Histories, Curator Darrel R. Frost has created a comprehensive reference about amphibians. He manages Amphibian Species of the World, an online database and classification system for about 7,000 amphibian species, of which about 6,200 are frogs.